March 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Schools in NSW have now been back almost exactly one month. Either a lot of kids have caught Covid at school, or we have a major truancy problem. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/MXCihTnvgL
I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the NSW Government introduced the same rigorous methodology for tracking Covid cases, as it uses for allocating grants prior to an election. You collect the data you want to see.
A friend with kids in a Catholic High School. They will celebrate lifting of restrictions with a whole-school mass. Singing, the works. Small country town. I smell danger, to the entire town.
Why don’t any of these stores make it into daily news reports? https://t.co/JNOZMteTQe
On top of the total radio silence on actual details of Covid in schools, is the vacuum of reporting on what’s happening on university campuses right now, with infection. Particularly residential colleges. #COVID19Aus
You’d only need 2-3 stories like this in the news every day to derail the whole living with Covid rubbish. You can understand politicians suppressing it, but what’s the conspiracy of silence from media outlets? Nobody gives a shit about kids? https://t.co/QcWBWgbJIj
I doubt he’ll face the same challenge as some workers I know, who have run out of sick leave already. Another ‘live with the virus’ fantasy. People being repeatedly infected don’t have infinite sick leave. And it’s not their fault they were forced to work with high Covid spread. https://t.co/2ITN3CGvqd
This is where reframing the entire pandemic around hospital 'capacity' pays off for politicians. Hospitalisations and ICU still trending down. Cases trending up. https://t.co/FS49gbLjkz
Prevalence is still the main game, I think. Not least because a pandemic is defined by case numbers, not severity of outcome. Will the NSW/Australia case numbers plateau at a high rate, like right now? Or go down? Is Covid a permanent house guest? https://t.co/OjebX26v3G
The most recent NSW Government guidelines for Covid isolation require people to restart isolation, if somebody else in their household develops Covid while the family is isolating and they haven't been distancing from them. Haven't seen this publicised, and I bet few will bother.
Has any member of National Cabinet, from the PM down, wished ANY Australian a speedy recovery from Covid infection, in the past 2 years? Infected Australians have been statistics. Some of National Cabinet don't even mention deaths. #auspol https://t.co/dZoyVMr2gP
It's heretical to say it, as a huge supporter of vaccination. But I think if we hadn't developed Covid vaccines, the public health response may have been more effective, saved more lives and shortened the pandemic. Politicians use them like band aids.
A Covid death every 30 minutes in 2022, in Australia. 'The pandemic is over'. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/DMqF5xPFUl
I love discussion and debate. If you respond to a Tweet of mine with just ad hominem sewage though, it’s instant block. Time for society to draw a line in the sand. I see it also as a way of adding some level of regulation to social media, if we all do it.
As an ex-teacher, I’ve tried as well to point out that the NSW government was never going to take ventilation seriously in schools, when they still haven’t even bothered tor remove unflued gas heaters. We all remember these from our youth. They’re still there. https://t.co/ai7tD7sUVS
Going on holidays for a few weeks, so will likely only be occasionally here, if at all.
The targeting only of people ‘at risk of severe disease’ is the carrying over of the political targeting of marginal seats, to public health. Picking only the politically dangerous outcomes for action. https://t.co/3l4JzGY4IZ
The political libertarians at work again, trying to individualise collective events. Floods become your ‘personal responsibility’, via your insurance. Insurance is like hospitals for Covid, should be a last line of defence, not front line of attack. https://t.co/hRicv9bd4Y
If you’re a public health professional, and your Covid shtick is to repeat ’get vaccinated’ like a parrot while ridiculing all other simultaneous attempts to control the spread of infection, why is somebody paying you? Parrots cost a lot less.
The minimisers will be out in force saying it’s because not enough people are vaccinated. That’s half-true. The other half is rampant prevalence. Forgetting the latter is like saying your house flooded because you didn’t sandbag enough. https://t.co/AgbJk6KRzw
If AHPPC endorse National Cabinet's wish to remove close contact requirements, with cases surging, you'd have to ask why they even exist.
Converting public health practice to 'personal responsibility' is like trying to build Snowy Hydro 2.0 by asking everybody to buy a bag of concrete, and meet up on the weekend for a working bee. https://t.co/6MVU4Sv33T
Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for the image. Isn't it remarkable that hospital admissions got to almost EXACTLY NSW public hospital system capacity? And despite cases being 3-4 times more than the 25,000 per day projected by the Health Minister pre-Christmas? What a coincidence! https://t.co/sivuI0bB80
The little things betray the lie of the ‘Economy’. Giving households smashed by cost of living pressures assistance might ‘overheat’ it. So what is the bloody Economy, if not those households, who is it for? There’s a clear answer - it’s not for them/us. https://t.co/i0iaJYjaOU
Have been away a few weeks. Did anybody solve the issue of availability of (decent) MERV filters in Australia to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes?
It’s a flaw in current democracy that it makes much difference at all who gets elected. Well over 95% of what needs to happen in a country every day is done by its institutions. Our elections have become pivotal only because those institutions have been deliberately sidelined.
Great what creative work some experts can do, while others sit on their computers playing culture war games while parroting ‘just get vaccinated’. https://t.co/oZtMhmbdsI
‘We can never lock down again’. Except for the past 9 months. Worst lockdown of the pandemic so far, bizarrely called ‘opening up’. https://t.co/eFyahJvCZa
I suspect that the deliberate infection of the Australian community fundamentally misreads how Australians perceive the role of government. Australians are not at war with their institutions, as those in the UK and US are. South Australia may be the beginning of the reckoning.
Have suggested for a while that it’s the area under the case curves that is becoming more important. https://t.co/43nTWCV5RC
This is v interesting. Growing immunity is possibly collapsing pre-symptomatic contagiousness. https://t.co/XuBuzffiFX
The attention to mental health, from the conservatives. Sounds great. But it’s the same dogma. Much of the problem is people brutalised by the realities of the modern ‘Economy’. Medicalising it makes it your problem, not theirs. They did the same with vaccines and Covid.
The conservatives used all of these schemes the same way they use schemes in private education. As Trojan Horses to undermine the whole universal provision framework. Let’s not fix the bloody horse. Burn it. https://t.co/rLjwSsw9bQ
Ironically, by rushing to pretend the pandemic was over, National Cabinet removed a crisis in the public mind. A crisis that was the only reason many would vote for them.
So, if you’re a journalist, isn’t now the time you’d ask the NSW Government why it removed masks in schools, claiming cases are ‘extremely low’ there? #nswpol https://t.co/WgRs9B8U78
It’s glorious watching the flailing confusion of those who screeched the educational apocalypse of lockdowns for the past 2 years. And how wrong they were, and still are. Their crocodile tears over child mental health will be the next domino to fall. https://t.co/DwdAz7KcZ2
Penal colonies have an unemployment rate of 0%. I don’t get aroused by fractions of a percent decline in unemployment, when many of the people with those jobs are the working poor. Economic growth and unemployment are the metrics of slavery. The rich are rarely employed.
Every modern conservative victory is a victory for sleight of hand. Creating the illusion that a nation’s prosperity trickles down from a tiny number hoarding its wealth. Remove the CEOs and conservative leaders, and a country goes on just fine. Remove workers…everything stops. https://t.co/amFkdhYOdr
Monday morning at work, figuring out how to rejig things to keep them running with the latest Covid absences. I'm sure the story in many businesses and schools across the country. The pollie 'fix' of letting people circulate while infected - how dumb are we?
Have been watching this play out since last week. Predictably most journalists were too lazy to do anything except re-format the drops from the PMO. https://t.co/RpH9kV1Yop
One symptom of the libertarian victory in our societies is the assumption that a person can only be wearing a mask to protect themselves. https://t.co/RfWaO9c2JZ
The confidence trick of 'confidence'. Economically it means 'how much people are willing to spend and borrow beyond their means'. If it lags there, offer cheaper money and grants. With Covid, it means 'how much people are willing to allow themselves to become infected'. https://t.co/MaY1HfuLa0
Ah The Australian. Megaphone for the myth of the Economy, the conservative substitute for society. A con job 50 years in the making, slowly unravelling. https://t.co/qqZMAFjdlr
One thing you can do to help others, is wear a mask. Another is not organise large Covid-unsafe gatherings and invite your friends, putting them in the difficult situation of having to 'balance' their friendship with you, with their health.
When I hear people say 'so what do you suggest, we lock down forever?', I'm reminded of the detailed, nuanced public health strategies we use for other infectious diseases. Like this, just one part of the NSW control strategy for pertussis. https://t.co/jTDqoT1D27
Guy Rundle's piece highlights how so much of what we call journalism now is just lazy gossip. https://t.co/5ybxqHGRn9
Another expert on the radio this afternoon, talking about the death of a 2-year old from Covid. Parents can be reassured, apparently, that the ‘majority’ of children will have a mild illness. /1
Worth repeating I think that there isn’t a disease on the immunisation schedule that we’d have bothered developing vaccines for, if that had been our view and attitude then. 2/2
Are we seeing any reinfection data yet for Australia? @Mike_Honey_ @dbRaevn @DeadInLongRun @juliette_io @datapossum @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/o637SLzfS6
Every edifice of N=1 politics is starting to crumble. Let’s go back to that old-fashioned idea of common-wealth. It’s still in our name. https://t.co/nOjMv1JFmF
UK data suggest you really don’t want to be sitting on only 2 vaccine doses right now. https://t.co/alOKJb58EY
Clock is ticking on the Australian winter. It may reflect 3rd dose vaccination demographics in the US, but still pretty substantial waning here. And this is for hospitalisation. https://t.co/1HL1yrgWSO
The hypothesis that most of Australia thinks 'living with the virus' is a crock of shit is so far supported by polling. https://t.co/764UuXMZO6
The minimisers love to say 'child infection just reflects wider community infection'. That'd be a perverse reading of graphs like this. Even if it were true, they're saying 'Covid is out of control everywhere'. And that's supposed to be a good thing. https://t.co/pt1wAp98Eg
It's an indictment on media self-regulation that SKY News is even allowed to operate in Australia. https://t.co/j7mLBtxatb
The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T
The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the great neoliberal and libertarian (what I call N=1 politics) push of the past 50 years. The fact those have occurred together should yell to us that something is not right here. /2
How does a political philosophy that kneels before the altar of individuality and personal responsibility, come to be the greatest fan of majority decision-making? And so dismissive of minorities? Unravel this and you unravel the heart of modern conservative.../3
...politics. You can be a conservative without being a libertarian. In fact and as an aside, conservatism without the N=1 trappings is probably the soundest of all political philosophies,.../4
...the idea that custom and tradition are our best guides. Custom and tradition guide us well because they represent a sort of survival of the fittest of human belief. They help us avoid the politics of short-term populism. Aside over. /5
Anyway, modern conservatives push majority politics because they're marketing men (they're mostly men). They know a majority is really just a market, to be built and manipulated. They do that all the time in business. Humans imitate, copy, the root of society. Peer pressure. /6
Unfortunately at the same time we think democracy is the rule of the majority. The libertarians have carefully marketed that view, over the past 50 years. We think it's also how our elections and parliaments work, so they get away with it. In fact it's true of neither. /7
Yes you need a majority in an election or parliament, to win the vote. But with preferential voting for example that's far from being some simple numerical sum. And there are multiple checks and balances built into parliamentary votes too, including having to pass 2 houses. /8
A 'majority' is just the compromise most people will support. And because people don't vote on specific decisions or issues, but rather on a general 'mandate' for somebody to govern for a few years - they delegate authority to be led - it's built right into the DNA of our.../9
...political processes that for nearly every decision that gets made in government, not only is a majority of the public not required, but in fact the public is not even involved. That's fine, that's what representative governance means. But when a conservative government.../10
...then talks endlessly about their 'mandate' to do whatever they like, the bullshit comes into view. Their only mandate is to govern, it's completely separate to most of the specific decisions they'll be asked to make. Representative government requires a huge number of.../11
...checks and balances to arrive at those decisions. But once you start saying the mandate was to do whatever they liked, governments are free to ignore all of those checks and balances, their departmental advice, their negotiation with opposing parties etc. /12
They can even close the parliament altogether and set up a 'National Cabinet', with zero representation from representatives who nearly 50% of the population voted for. This is populism, the sibling of majority politics. What is popular is the new God. /13
(This is actually high school, which I've Tweeted about a lot, but that's another issue.) Now provided a government is popular, they can literally do whatever they like, all requirement to meet any checks and balances at all is removed. Departmental heads are replaced by.../14
...hand-picked political advisers. (We remember the turf wars between these even in Yes Minister, which was written when these changes were in their infancy.) But to bring this back to majorities and why they're such a weapon for modern conservatism.../15
Obviously firstly because of the populist way it allows due process to be swept away, as above. But it goes further, because it also says the right thing to do, is the thing most people want you to do. 'Majority rules'. This is so embedded in popular understanding of how.../16
...democracy works that many I'm sure would even use it as the definition of democracy. But it isn't. Democracy is government of the people, by the people. There's ZERO reference to head counting. The origin of democracy was to replace monarchs as the ultimate.../18
...justification for authority, with the people being ruled over themselves. There's not one reference to how they will enact this; it's a delegation thing, not a maths thing. And historically, the main impetus for the design of democratic methodology was actually about.../19
...protecting *minority* beliefs and peoples. That's what much of the checks and balances are about. Senates, as 'States' houses', protect smaller States from larger States. Etc. A clear recognition that the majority tends to look after itself, and the main reason to .../20
...bother with government at all is to protect those who aren't part of that majority. A democracy is fundamentally a mechanism for protecting minorities. Modern conservatives generally dislike minorities, and thus we can see they also fundamentally dislike democracy itself. /21
Modern populist politics is the old monarchical way of ruling, dressed up in democratic clothes. It's their sleight of hand, that has gradually reinstated the old monarchical ways, over the top of democratic mechanisms. N=1 folk don't give a fig about the individual,.../22
...they care about hierarchy. They use majority politics to reinstate old hierarchies, using the language of new ones. The individuals who benefit from their rule are themselves, and the wealthy and powerful they represent. /23
I'll end by saying that while we tend to assume democracy is the best way to do things, it's still quite arguable that it may not be. Look how easily they've succumbed to populism, to the restoration of 'kings'. Like Trump. Halfwit but imperial. It is very possible that.../24
...some form of monarchy is the most stable form of government. History actually says this is true, overwhelmingly it's dominated by monarchies. Graber and Sahlins both suggested the same. So I think we need to be at least agnostic about the merits of democracy. And.../25 https://t.co/Z4vPR1XWWv
...try to get at least the best kings and queens we can find. Not reality TV stars, pentecostal zealots, sports and rock stars, or suburban accountants and lawyers. /end
Cut through the BS at least once a day. We’re led by a small group of corporately-funded pirates, who captured governments and gaslit entire populations into believing that we need to let a lethal virus spread among us, so that we can get back to work in their businesses.
The continuous motivated rubbish about how kids don’t catch Covid in schools. If they don’t, why does proper ventilation drop cases there by over 80%? https://t.co/IVgjLnRhxL
The ‘my body is a temple/natural health’ types are the apogee of libertarian politics. The individual as gated community.
There’s an existential tension in play right now, for our societies. Their ‘normal’ functioning is not compatible with containment of infectious disease, without a dramatic pharmaceutical. Hypermobility and mass gatherings. I think we need to interrogate those more deeply.
Speaking with people at work (the few that are left), about how some in the UK have now had Covid 3-4 times. 'Huh, how is that possible?' They thought getting it would give them 18 months of protection. The public health disaster is best understood in everyday chats.
They're going to need to. Only people working from home, Macquarie Street and/or retired seem unaware of the chaos in employment land at the moment. https://t.co/H0Oe82fN98
Covid minimisers hate the comparison between live with the virus, and feedlot farming. A good reason to draw the comparison regularly. /1 https://t.co/K4rhAcfD3H
It takes a modern form of political sociopath to see families using up their sick and carer's leave through repeated pandemic virus infection, and say the solution is to force them to work when infected. They've had their 'jabs', they'll say. /2
Feedlot farms cease to function without regular, heavy medication. They use much of society's antibiotics, just for starters. Of course the simpler solution would be to not use feedlots. Like not sending people back to work with a virus rampantly spreading. /end
Admirable caution being leaked here. If AHPPC supports National Cabinet on this one, give up now. https://t.co/2JDQAan2zK
This was us too, envy of the world. Until vaccines arrived, and the local Tories weaponised them to make us a carbon copy of their dipshit murderous cousins overseas. https://t.co/6N8N8pEBb5
This graph from Roy Morgan I think shows an essential truth about Australian politics. People hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at 2008 (GFC) and early-mid 2020 (national lockdown). A few implications…/1 https://t.co/EfAnbgHngU
Look at that astronomical support for national lockdown. Talk about squeaky wheels getting the grease; the endless, tedious anti-lockdown freedom narratives are clearly a small, loud minority of Australians. By extension, those who chose to let Covid rip before Christmas…/2
…may have committed the most spectacular act of political suicide in Australian history. To deliberately inflict a crisis on the community, mass infection - it’s hard to not feel this coming election will be savage. And the Premiers on National Cabinet who…/3
…backed the let it rip, their electoral apocalypse may be just a short way further down the road. My gut says this was the most ridiculous and disgusting miscalculation of the Australian political psyche in its entire history. Time will tell. /end
Cases in Queensland jumped 15% in the community last week, and 55% in schools. How long do we have to keep listening to prominent minimisers saying ‘kids catch it in the community, not in schools’?
I’m sure many of us would walk away from our jobs at age 25, if we had $30 million in the bank. As David Lee Roth once said, money may not make you happy, but you can buy a big yacht and sail right up next to it.
Infected people are sick people. A lot of infected people = a lot of sick people. Letting Covid rip makes societies permanently sick. It’s not called Public Sick, it’s called Public Health.
Worth watching multiple times every day. It helps with mental health. https://t.co/4isSzCMkU2
Remembering that loud, ignorant voices insisted we send our children back to schools to get infected with Covid, so they could rescue their mental health and education. Education results have been in free fall for at least a decade. And mental health… https://t.co/5qozkSaTq6
"…they (ATAGI) are potentially going to recommend a second booster, which would then be potentially the start of an annual program for people 65 and above," Mr Hunt said. Do we read this as ‘and the rest of you have repeated infection for your immunity, in the years to come’?
For a conservative, one is born privileged, or poor. It’s about ‘breeding’. This aristocratic view in the past at least included a sense of duty, of noblesse oblige. The servants were part of the family. Now replaced with the gig economy. We’re back to slaveowners and slaves. https://t.co/xZ6HUuXL8F
I missed this at the time. @RichardfromSyd1 guessing this became a topic of discussion amingst the data folk? https://t.co/bJzasDzbUp
Living the NSW dream. A friend tells of staff at work with kids at home badly ill with Covid. Staff are there because they've tested negative on a RAT, as per government rules. The kids have only been sick less than a week. No masks required for them in the workplace.
"Prevention of severe illness from COVID-19 remains the primary goal of the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination program." Once politicians make that the framework, mass infection is just assumed. https://t.co/IvQwJstG7t
Workplaces whose staff numbers have been decimated by Covid are not suffering from 'staff shortages', the latest renormalising spin. It's not a HR problem. It's a public health problem.
"Attempts to reach 'herd immunity' through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting Covid-19 spread through populations, of any age or health status will lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and death." World Health Organisation
h/t @YouAreLobbyLud
Apropos of nothing, and because the world is still full of wonders even in crises. The e+ is an electron, travelling backwards in time. A positron. PET scanners in hospitals use these. They’re time machines. https://t.co/lZo9iE9r3f
What we’re seeing right now with Covid is the politics of privilege. Decades of living as if humans have no Earthly constraints, steadfastly refusing to be brought back to a life with sensible constraint. Climate change the same. Reality is now invoicing us.
Julian Tang on UK TV this morning, asked whether Covid is now like seasonal flu. No, it’s still in an epidemic wave pattern. If it does make that transition, it may take ‘several years’.
Notice the Infinite Covid folk have shifted from endemic now, to permanent epidemic waves. Nobody noticed in the press gallery? Hello? Anybody home? https://t.co/ZhGs3Copik
The main roadblock to beating Covid globally is the hyper-narrowing of society’s focus to one statistical indicator, economic growth. Where ephemeral small businesses boom and bust inside 5 years, and human ambition is restricted to building new roads to connect new property…/1 https://t.co/HQgI8wCkKi
…developments (to enrich developers) to centres of work. To ferry people to and from meaningless jobs they mostly hate. We had to get rid of all those pubic heath measures because they got in the way of us sitting in traffic every day, to get to a workplace that we can’t…/2
…wait to retire from. Can anybody name even one great collective project our societies were working on, that we were eager to get back to out of the pandemic? Or were we all just desperate to relieve meaningless working lives with 4 weeks (if we’re lucky) annual leave…/3
…in a resort somewhere overrun with similarly bored rich tourists, packed into the cheap end of sardine can airliners to get there and back? Doesn’t anybody else feel like we couldn’t fight Covid, because the farmer wanted us back laying eggs? Our lockdowns…/4
…that locked down mostly workplaces, our laying cages. Our free range taste of freedom from the daily grind, it ran the risk that we’d all stop shitting out economic eggs? /end
Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U
From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to ‘balance’ action to defeat the pandemic, against economic disruption. We should have been immediately suspicious, as these same politicians have spent decades using this idea of balance…/2
…to undermine action on climate change. When action against climate change is ‘balanced’ against economic disruption, there is never any action against climate change. And never mind that the entire discipline of public health, established by governments, was invented…/3
…to do this actual balancing, to keep the public healthy and functioning in the face of health threats. A politician saying their own balancing mechanism has to be balanced again, with the Economy, you know they’re speaking with a forked tongue. But alas it wasn’t called out. /4
Politicians of old knew a bit about balance. Humanity’s greatest invention to provide balance in society is something politicians create. Law. The whole idea of law is to create a balance across all of society, in a particular area. We are ‘all equal before the law’. /5
That’s what that saying means. Law ‘weighs’ competing priorities and creates a balanced outcome for all parties. It does it ‘blindly’ (Lady Justice’s blindfold). She weighs it with her scales, ignoring rank, position, etc. And don’t be sidetracked if somebody questions…/6
…what this has to do with public health or the Economy, because both of those activities use law heavily. And they use it to create the balance modern politicians love to speak about. A Public Health Order, a set of legal rules to fight a pandemic, is the most balanced…/7
…public health tool we have. More even than vaccinations, which have differential efficacy according to age, pre-existing conditions, etc. A legal pandemic rule will apply to all, equally. The poor and rich alike are beholden to it. A ‘lockdown’ (idiot, political term)…/8
…’locks down’ everybody. It’s the strongest expression of ‘we’re all in this together’, because it’s all of us making the rule, through our elected representatives, to then apply to all of us in turn. ‘Personal responsibility’, the nonsense our current leaders suggest as an…/9
…alternative, is entirely at the whim of personal circumstances. Society’s wealthiest and most powerful people will have vastly more options to avoid becoming infected and seriously ill, than those without wealth or power. They often don’t need to work, for starters, and…/10
…the world over they’ve been retreating to their super yachts and bunkers, educating their children at home, waiting for Covid to feast on the rest of us, before they re-emerge. Without a ‘lockdown’ the rest of us continue to work to support these parasitic leeches,…/11
…providing their food and drink and other services. Vaccines don’t re-balance things, because the privileged are still able to avoid contact with infection much more than others. We should see the global rush to strip away public health orders, legal weapons against…/12
…Covid, as driven mostly by these same people. The tax avoiders, the people who have teams of lawyers and accountants working full-time in normal times to avoid their legal obligations. Ignore their crocodile tears about ‘balance’, it was always self-interested bullshit. /13
To finish, I think it’s worth unpacking a little some similarities between the legal and public health uses of the concept of a ‘case’. A legal case is, I think, possibly the greatest invention in all of human history. (Bear with me.) /14
All of our history as societies revolves around answering one question. What is the best way to balance the needs of individuals against the needs of the groups that they’re a part of? Or the needs of nations, against the needs of the international community? Same question,…/15
…at every scale of society. The local versus the global, the micro versus the macro. Etc. All of our politics fights about these questions, disciplines are set up around them (micro- and macroeconomics). But the crazy thing is, humanity already solved this problem. /16
The law solved it. It’s the root of all law. A legal ‘case’ is both individual and collective, local and global, at the same time. Every new legal case (individual, local) has to work with the precedent of previous cases (collective, global). /17
The individual case makes no sense without the precedents, but the individual case can also alter those precedents, if it decides against them. The law completely ignores scale, it says it doesn’t exist. Every case is both singular and universal, at the same time. Laws even…/18
…get named after the individual cases that sometimes prompt them. Laws that will apply to all of us. To compare with a public health ‘case’, a Covid infection. It’s exactly the same. Despite the attempts by disgusting political libertarians to ‘ring-fence’ infections…/19
…in poor areas, in this pandemic (which didn’t work), an infection is both localised and globalised, at the same time. The individual is infected, with a virus that circulates globally. Their infection in turn has collective, global effects. Why does this matter? /20
Because every case, every infection, is both the individual being infected, and the whole society being infected. You can’t separate them. The reason law is the most powerful weapon against a pandemic is because it can deal with cases, in both meanings of the word. /21
That’s not coincidental. Law is what binds societies, what creates parts and wholes, individuals and groups. Law is the way we build societies. Where being an individual and being a group is the same thing, not 2 things. /22
Law would have ended this pandemic already. If we’d stuck with it. /end
Nothing says ‘society is a high school peopled with adolescents of all ages’ better than the social media response to Taylor Hawkins’ or any rock star’s death, compared to the silence about the ongoing mountain of Covid bodies.
I saw a lot of hesitation about the far-UVC research last year. But it seems to be delivering. I’m sure ventilation experts may still have caveats, would be interested to hear. It could be an extraordinary game-changer. https://t.co/hAMvGA8gRC
Every day, the basics. - all infection is illness. - public health controls illness. - mass infection is a failure of public health. - public health was invented by governments. - public health is a government’s job. - the ‘Economy’ is a fictional substitute for society.
SKY News currently screening a half-hour party political featuring Josh Frydenberg, under the pretend cover of journalism about the budget. Nauseating. His opponent, an independent, described as ‘cashed up’, the latest LNP-Murdoch election spin. /1 #auspol
Remember both major parties are currently in full election mode, on the taxpayer’s coin. Neither will officially ‘launch’ their campaigns until just before the election, so that significant electioneering costs will be borne by taxpayers. /end
I’m no virologist, but the number of people I’ve seen say Covid will become mild ‘like other coronaviruses’? Aren’t Sars-Cov-1 and MERS an easy counter to that? Like any virus family, there seem a whole range of virulence outcomes that are possible in the longer term.
With no government appetite to control virus spread or even offer ongoing mass vaccination except to vulnerable groups, is a person better off catching Covid now, while they’re still closer to their last shot? Won’t risk of severe disease increase with time from last dose?
WIll the real story of how hospital in the home and other outside hospital care modalities were used during this pandemic ever be told?
How about a ‘permissive recommendation’ here too? For those who want a 4th dose? Those happily swimming in Covid are free to continue. https://t.co/56Ec5kAwTI
This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP
As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden to the whim of populist politics. Rather than there being any sensible, wide assessment of need, funding is usually allocated in the novelty cheque way, targeted at electoral advantage. Talk to any local government…/2
…authority and they’ll tell you what their backlog of road maintenance and building is. And it will usually be a figure in the many millions. The same populist problem recurs there, with local councillors redirecting vital funding to trophy projects they think will win votes. /3
This is why many regional towns now have extraordinarily extravagant aquatic centres, for example, ruinously expensive to build and run. But it wins votes. This all happens because populism has led us to believe that political representatives actually ‘run the country’. /4
They don’t, they were never supposed to. The *running* of the country is done by officials, that’s how our democracy is designed. If you’ve worked in government you’ll have seen the reality of this every day. And the country ‘runs’ just fine in the caretaker period before…/5
…elections, which nobody comments much on. That’s because it’s always run without politicians needing to provide much input. Politicians simply don’t have the knowledge to run almost anything in a modern society, and nor should they need to. Their job is to ‘represent’…/6
…us in this running of the country. We have a representative democracy, that’s their job. Not to run the country, but to be our voice in the discussions with officials about what needs doing. Populism by definition cuts the officials out of the conversation, or installs…/7
…its own biddable experts. The accumulated expertise of generations of running the country is therefore sidelined. We’re living the chaos of that right now, with Covid, climate change, road funding, energy policy - the list could run for pages. /end
Two races in, and the rule changes lead to…exactly the same teams winning all of the races, and everybody else being an afterthought. The whole formula is a joke. https://t.co/Gi7eLfKVTk
Anybody remember being told to go to work or school, with the flu? Every day, some new normalisation of the indefensible. Don’t think this won’t happen in Australia. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/RYC0aJ9fnX
Still doesn’t seem to be any AHPPC announcement from its meeting last Wednesday? On the National Cabinet’s lunatic plan to remove close contact requirements? #auspol #covid19aus
AHPPC appears to have recommended last Wednesday that 7-day isolation for the infected and close contacts is to remain? Is this now the decision, or does the fact nobody seems to have said anything about it mean National Cabinet is thinking of ignoring it? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/CRpwAxfhLK
The day’s events suggest the leader who punches the other in the face at the televised leadership debates will win the election in a landslide.
Some days are just too dumb. Got nothin’ today.
Life is a high school, you can’t unsee it. High school speech night, with one boy storming the stage to whack another, because he disrespected his girl. Yeh, this is how grown ups behave. https://t.co/99NFotFMuh
Nearly 3 months since school went back. Reckon the government accidentally reversed ‘vaccination’ and ‘open schools’ on their Gantt Chart? Me either. https://t.co/kq0C9NDTfC
The endgame of populist conservative rule is always some form of absolute monarchy. Trump was the most King-like of any monarch worldwide. https://t.co/yKQ8lOpsWY
"The NSW Health spokesperson said the best way to avoid COVID-19 infection was to remain up to date with vaccination against the virus." Maybe it was a cleaner or canteen person at NSW Health.
The Will Smith thing shows so well I think how neoliberal, libertarian N=1 politics has atomised society. What should be a case of common assault becomes instead a platform for a bewildering array of personal grievances. Everything is always about me. /1
This isn’t just social media making visible a variety of opinions and world views. The views we see increasingly have little connection with anything else at all, except that personal grievance. They’re hardened, absolute views. Not a multiplicity of takes on a common world,…/2
…but millions of totalities, incommensurate with all of the others. Each view increasingly a whole society unto itself. Look at the pandemic, used as a platform by so many to prosecute their particular grievance. Rarely used as a platform to beat Covid itself. /end
“The department has deployed more than 350 staff from head office into schools, and more than 2000 final-year university students...” A measure of how little teaching is respected, that the same thing would be seen as suicidally irresponsible in a hospital.
My expert Budget analysis. “Here’s some cash, please re-elect us to government, so we can get on with the job of dismantling government.”
This seems a not uncommon view among virologists. I wonder about surrendering the control of spread, it’s spread that is the social and political core of infection. It’s the ‘public’ health bit. It indicates poor living conditions, that need attention. https://t.co/n2GhCfYZhW
Appointment with my GP this morning. She said it's 'just a matter of time' until 4th doses are offered widely, for winter. I wonder if that's a discussion we're not privy to, but happening nonetheless.
Every number going up, except vaccinations. A mono-dimensional public health strategy, where we can't even bother doing the single dimension. https://t.co/v7ReXjoacy
Speaking to employers about vaccination. It's fallen off a cliff, their staff won't now get a 3rd shot, and fluvax numbers for the coming year also only a fraction of previous years, for many. Prime example of how a fish rots from the head. No government leadership = no action.
Let them eat cake, in the old language. https://t.co/VfVEDeLeDt
Always follow the money. https://t.co/FlduruAsfG
Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An appeal to facts is used, as if this…/1
…will somehow sway these elites. They’re totally oblivious to them, we should know that by now. Look at their easy ignoring of all evidence on climate change, for years. To them we sound like Oliver, a whining child to be swatted away. School teachers can teach us here. /2 https://t.co/94ZIuR5xQ9
If you’ve ever taught, you’ll know that any sort of pleading with your students to do something will be immediately perceived by them as weakness. They viscerally feel it as somebody not filling an expected role of authority. Young teachers can transform their work overnight…/3
…by simply acting in a more confident away. By acting and speaking as if they just assume they will be obeyed and listened to. Children pick up on this immediately. But the same applies in adult debate. The forces that need to prevail in 2022 too often sound like what they…/4
…effectively are. Servants to these economic elites, pleading for change. Protesting, and I always want to ask protestors - who are you protesting TO? Why assume somebody else already ‘has power’, and you need to convince them, to get change? That assumption will create... /5
…the reality you’re trying to overcome. It’s time for good people to speak with the authority of the blindingly obvious points they’re trying to make. It is unspeakably ludicrous to allow entire populations to become infected with SARS-Cov-2, for example. Don’t waste too…/6
…much time constantly explaining why it’s ludicrous. They’re not listening to logic or explanation. Speak as they speak, with the convictions of the self-evidence of your position, mock them and attack them, because make no mistake, these are not in any way nice people. /7
Assume power, in how you feel and what you say. It will irritate them to the point of total apoplexy, because to them you’re Oliver, impertinently stepping outside your allowed boundaries. @YouAreLobbyLud does this all the time, it’s why many of the economic elite and…/8
…their house-trained poodle experts attack him continuously. It’s a sign this is where you hurt them. Good people have forgotten how to fight. It needn’t even involve anger, remember again these economic elites act with casual, humoured indifference to what they do to you. /9
Do the same to them, in reverse. Treat them as the laughable fools they are, have sport with their idiocy. Politicians lose badly when they become figures of fun, as Scott Morrison is discovering right now. The same principle applies everywhere. /end
(P.S. it’s not about ‘speaking truth to power’. That’s being just an unruly servant. It’s speaking the power OF truth.)
While on how to speak truth into power (rather than to power), I think it pays to remember that privilege is never offended by what you say. They're offended that you think you have the right to say it. Know your place, seen and not heard etc.
Hospitalisations and deaths both trending up. Those were the metrics the National Cabinet told us to look at. So...we're looking. What happens now? https://t.co/e67HXHSxH2
National Strike. Politicians and captains of industry, if you want to live with this virus, go for it, run a Covid camp somewhere. Fuck off and leave the rest of us alone. https://t.co/JjYtrK4YGA
This took some doing. And with Oz cases said to be perhaps 10x what we’re actually seeing in testing… https://t.co/gULwle8W8Q
What political opponents to the current conservative, neoliberal, libertarian orthodoxy in the developed may need to do is be as populist as their opponents. Good people are too nice, politically. We’ve seen outrageous populism from conservative politics. Here’s an idea. /1
Right now opponents to the status quo are regularly beaten at elections and between elections by conservative politicians whose moral compass was thrown overboard many years ago. It’s really regulatory capture we’re seeing, on a global scale. Government has been captured…/2
…almost entirely by vested interests. Not even much lobbying needed now, political candidates are now increasingly the old lobbyists themselves. These candidates are like parents offering kids a diet of nothing but lollies. Political practice always cautioned strongly…/3
…against populism, identifying rightly that its effects were generally short-lived and the consequences long-lasting. But that’s all gone now. These same vested interests have recognised that if they act like Kings and Queens, like extravagant monarchs, it taps into deep…/4
…social desires about leadership. We saw this so clearly with Trump, and to some extent with the Tories in the UK. Utterly flagrant lying and disregard for due process, but wildly popular because done in that old way Kings were popular. Royal whim is different to politics. /5
Kings were loved FOR this arbitrary use of power, for that feeling of absolute power. Due process may be an administrator’s passion, but it has never been a peoples’ passion. But both have always been there, you absolutely need both. /6
So, my idea. Progressive opponents of the current neoliberal regimes in the developed world have to play the same game. Make outrageously populist promises, govern in outrageously populist ways. And have proper government administration happening at the same time. /7
Just don’t make *that* the basis for election victory. Right now progressive politics feels bamboozled by the conservative populists, feeling they need to do the right/due process thing in response, and to use that as the basis of their election strategy. It’s a mistake. /8
The people hate that stuff, they see it as ‘bureaucracy’. They want a King or Queen. So give them one. Do all the due process stuff underneath when in government, as monarchs used to do as well. But it’s not a selling point. And lie, liberally, as the neoliberals do. /9
Play as dirty as them. The key thing is to understand that this isn’t about debasing politics, it’s about recognising that monarchy is far and away the most long-lasting, popular form of government in human history. Nothing else is even close in second place. So use that. /end
Thanks to @JayneFlan. Workers who contract Covid and are working in an area of ‘presumptive employment’ (more below) are ‘automatically presumed to have contracted the disease in the course of their employment’. Huge? /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/BwWPohSSQ9
Some employers are operating under the assumption that it will be employees who will need to prove they contracted Covid at work, to get any compensation. But in these (extensive) areas of prescribed employment, the presumption is the exact opposite. /2 https://t.co/S9vYe2EAdm
In those areas, the employer will need to prove the employee didn’t catch it at work. And I assume that proof will be largely about what Covid mitigations the workplace has. Anybody skilled in workplace law may be able to point out gaps in understanding? Seems clear cut. /end